It's 7 am, there's a chill in the morning air and the sun has barely risen, but Ricky Webster is smiling from ear to ear while stocking shelves with loaves of freshly baked bread.
Webster is the owner of Rind and Wheat bakery on the edge of Browne's Addition on West Riverside Avenue.
With 20-plus years of experience as a chef — previously running the kitchen at a now-closed local hotel and working with Sysco Spokane — and after realizing Spokane lacked an artisan cheese shop/bakery, Webster decided in October 2020 to open the bakery he'd been planning in his head for years.
It's close quarters inside the shop, but there's no need for a huge space to create the glutinous magic that Rind and Wheat bakes up.
Right now, Rind and Wheat is in a transitional period. While Webster runs the place, Auriel Adams is the shop's sole baker.
And she has no time for funny business when it comes to bread.
"Because there's no one else mucking up the process, like finishing what I've already started," she says. "I get to make all of the loaves and bake them myself. That means I can put a ton of care into each loaf and ensure that every single one of them is up to my standards."
Rind and Wheat, which also sells pastries and cheese, focuses its efforts on sourdough bread.
Adams mentions that there are a ton of factors that go into the creation of a single loaf of bread, the first of which is Bob.
"Bob is our starter," Adams says. "He's a member of our family, and he's just as important, or more important, than the baker. In order for the bread to be perfect, Bob has to be nice and healthy."
Adams and Webster feed Bob everyday. Even on holidays, it's important that Bob gets fed. He holds Rind and Wheat together.
After that, all of the ingredients get measured, put into a mixer and the process begins.
She carefully splits the dough and weighs it down to the gram on a digital scale — precision is key in order to make each loaf as uniform as possible. Adams deftly rolls the dough into perfect loaves, flour fills the air, and she carefully scores each new little loaf before placing them in a floured basket for the final rise.
From start to finish, it takes Adams three days to make one batch of Rind and Wheat's signature sourdough loaves.
"My philosophy is what you put in is what you get out," Webster says. "[Bread] is not bad for us. We've done some things to our Earth, we've done some things to our crops, we've done some things to the processing that have made it intolerable, so we want to go back to why and what made it special." ♦
